The Hand Eye Society and the Toronto Public Library system is having a game festival about words!The organizers are looking for video games and boardgames plus some non-game material too if you have it.
Taking place Saturday, Nov. 16th from 12-5pm at the Toronto Reference Library, WordPlay will be a free one-day festival to celebrate the most interesting writerly games. It’ll feature:
A showcase of local and international videogames and boardgames with a word or strong writing component.
A panel with game/book cross-media types.
A bookclub-style in-person discussion with the Chicago-based creators of IGF winner Kentucky Route Zero.
I have done some volunteer work trying to encourage media literacy in the digital world and I find myself running into similar conceptual issues that existed before the world got online. There are core issues associated with large media companies influencing how we engage politics and economics and the digital world is not immune to it. This is even more true as the line between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ media blur.
These issues I allude to can best be summed up by people smarter than me. As you watch/listen to the talks below you may say that the internet changes a lot of what’s brought up and I would agree. At the same time, the reach (and in some cases caliber) of citizen journalists is still not up to par with multinational massive media manufactures.
Michael Parenti gave a talk in 1993 that is still relevant today about how large media companies can and do influence the way we debate issues as a society. He opens with a comparison between a large American media company and the propaganda paper Pravda from the USSR; his criticism of the American media company is still relevant today.
Early on he talks about product placement and how insidious it can be, and today we don’t even bat an eye at the notion of including product placement into media production. Also, the threat of the “liberal media” was a debate back in 1993 whereas I thought it was a newer myth.
Now take a moment and think about how you’re being exposed to this thanks to a blog. The future seems so different right? Not so fast.
Parenti’s lecture got me thinking of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s take on the media in Manufacturing Consent which I watched in high school and is also, sadly, still pertinent to the media of today. Wikipedia has a good summation of their five key points of media control and you can watch the entire documentary below.
